Comment by endisneigh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by endisneigh | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure what you should call this phenomenon, but it basically goes like this:

- There are plenty of laws that you may or may not be aware of whose enforcement is disparate across the population, or perhaps not enforced at all.

For example, in Texas it's actually illegal to turn without using your turn signal at least 100 feet before the turn [^1]. There are similar laws that exist in California.

If you've ever driven in Texas for even an hour within the city or suburbs you'll know this law is rarely enforced, even when police are present.

Given the lack of enforcement, the (illegal) behavior is normalized. However, despite the normalization the behavior itself is still illegal.

Now here comes the tricky part - since everyone is engaging in illegal behavior, the police, if desired, could focus on any group and trivially reprimand them for their (technically) illegal behavior. This enforcement will be reflected in the demographic likelihood of breaking this particular rule which will reinforce the very focusing on certain demographics. Recursive, if you will.

Unfortunately despite being aware of this I'm not sure what the solution would be, other than mass-surveillance. Ultimately you would need to know (1) the rate at which groups are breaking the rule absolutely, (2) the rate of which enforcement is overlooked and (3) finally the rate at which enforcement occurs. We only have but a small piece of the puzzle here.

As long as this paradox exists police will have plausible deniability backed by their very own (misleading) stats. In my opinion this is the main driver of seemingly racist law enforcement. That is, selective enforcement.

^1 - https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/TN/htm/TN.545.htm

This is exactly what I think of when I hear "police being racist".

As a white person, I've never had a bad interaction with the police. At worst they are very authoritative, but never obnoxious.

Hearing about black people getting stopped for jaywalking, "loitering", and just generally yelled at, it's not right. Before the famous Starbucks case, I've never imagined someone could get arrested and handcuffed for using a restaurant's public bathroom (I guess technically for "customers only" but that's a dumb rule anyways).

I get the cops' side too, they deal with a lot of actual dangerous criminals (that maybe "look similar" because they're also black men) who have no morals and try to catch them off guard. That can drain empathy and make every situation tense. But that's no excuse for the blatant disregard of black people's humanity. If you can't approach someone both in control of the situation and respecting their humanity, then you're not qualified to be a cop.

I'm a volunteer fire fighter. So, first-responders to most 911 calls are us, unless there's a known violent actor in which case cops are sent.

Realizing that I get to deal with all the thankful people (or tragically heart broken) while cops get to deal with -- frankly -- the biggest assholes around... it doesn't validate shitty police in any way, it just made me understand that the system itself is broken.

The people cops are dealing with (most of the time) should have never gone so long without proper mental/physical health care. Or so little opportunity. Or whatever it is that makes is so you need someone with a gun to show up instead of someone with medical/fire training.

And being American themselves, the cops also don't have proper mental health care. There's just no way for a setup like this to not create a bad situation.

In the Starbucks incident neither man actually used the restroom, rather they were arrested for refusing to leave:

"Two black men walked into a Starbucks in downtown Philadelphia on Thursday afternoon and sat down. Officials said they had asked to use the restroom but because they had not bought anything, an employee refused the request. They were eventually asked to leave, and when they declined, an employee called the police" (1)

The charge of racism rests on the claim that they would not be asked to leave had they been white. But what is the evidence for that claim? Has no white person ever been asked to leave a Starbucks for sitting at a table without buying anything?

(1) https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/15/us/starbucks-philadelphia...

The problem I have with this argument is Starbucks has become so ubiquitous they stand as a meeting place within a community.

What does that mean? Imagine the contrast of meeting inside a posh restaurant and not buying anything, versus meeting at, say a 7-11 convenience store. The first one is not imaginable, but the second seems possible. (Have you ever been in a 7-11? Those workers don’t give a hoot about much of anything. Day old hot dogs on rollers).

If you’re in a private business which has this ‘meeting place’ reputation I think they are more lax with the buy ‘something or leave’ norm. That’s were I find objection with this story.

Of course particular owners, employees, locations, and the behavior of the non-buying guests are what makes the difference between _no harm, no foul_ and nuisance disturbance of the actual paying customers. Devil is in the details.

I sometimes think this is intentional, in the sense that trivial laws like these are kept on the books long term simply because they provide such a convenient mechanism to justify stops and other police activities that would otherwise not meet the burden needed to make them legal. I wonder if a solution might be to have certain categories of laws require re-evaluation every so often, in order to stay relevant. Almost like an expiry date, if they aren't explicitly renewed, they are no longer enforceable, thereby necessitating at least some kind of discussion on their continued relevance at regular intervals.

DING! There are several good arguments against cops as traffic law enforcers. But being able to stop anyone on a pretext of forgetting to signal or having a tail light out is a significant part law enforcement's ability to target and control so-called "undesirables".

Wouldn't the solution be to automatically repeal any laws that are not regularly enforced? A "use it lose it" rule. We could regularly commission studies to see which traffic laws are not being enforced.

Sounds similar in concept to the Sunset Commission in Texas, which automatically abolishes any state agency unless the legislature passes a bill to continue its existence after review every 12 years.

https://www.sunset.texas.gov/how-sunset-works

Surely an equivalent for automatically abolishing laws/regulations has been tried somewhere?

It is a question of even enforcement, not whether or not it is enforced at all.

Take the turn signal law. In suburbs or rural areas where you are probably pulling over a soccer mom whose next worst crime is being disorganized, it may not be worth the time for the stop.

If, however, the same cop is in a neighborhood where stopping someone has a reasonable chance of finding a greater crime- possession of drugs, unregistered weapons, driver has warrants for their arrest for missing court dates etc- they are more likely to enforce the turn signal law.

This is the heart of the Broken Windows theory which leads to disproportionate negative police encounters and claims of racism- presuming one stop will be more fruitful than another leads to stricter enforcement.

Substitute "race" for "area" if you prefer; they are sometimes, but not always, linked. I live just south of the meth capital of my state, and it is very white and rural. Because of that, you wouldn't know that it has much stricter enforcement of various laws than other parts of the state, but it doesn't get much attention because the whole county's population could fit inside a few blocks of NYC.

> reasonable chance of finding a greater crime- possession of drugs

Cops shouldn't be using selective enforcement of laws like this to go trolling for crimes.

It's how we get systemic racism / discrimination.

I wasn't suggesting that they ought to; I was responding to the idea that there are "unenforced laws" when the reality (for laws that are relevant to the parents point) is that they are enforced, just not evenly.

Apologies, I realize that now.

How would that work? You would have to track all of the times it should have been enforced but wasn't. And what about laws that do not have to be enforced because their existence prevented infractions?

The mass surveillance is already underway. Police have body cameras and dash cams in many jurisdictions. But good luck getting enough of that footage through an FOIA request -- so it's up to the police to decide whether or not this is an issue worthy of investigation.

Another solution might be repealing laws that are clearly not important enough to enforce uniformly across demographics.

> Homicide stats are immune to discretionary bias

Discretionary bias is still possible if you attempt to correlate the race stastics with the racial group as a whole while ignoring other factors such as social and economic status. For example the majoriry of murders that occur during a robbery are commited by poor people. A group made up of mostly middle/upper class citizens would mostly exclude those type of murder cases. Gang violence is another big driver of murder and also closely correlated to socioeconomic status. The middle class and up don't join gangs and therefore aren't part of organizations where murder is part of operations.

The discretion is on if you choose to rely on a correlation without looking at the actual causation to make conclusions.

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